I believe it became popular in many countries for two main reasons 1) It allowed to send unlimited messages at a time when telcos in many markets would charge you per individual text 2) Unlike existing alternatives at the time (gtalk, skype) it used your phone number as your account id, so setting up the app was frictionless, specially among non tech-savvy smartphone users.

Who is "we"? Is there really such a huge demand for encrypted messaging? I'm sure most people value more the convenience of being able to switch devices and still see their chat history across all of them over the enhanced privacy they would get by not having their messages centrally stored.

What a plane auto pilot system actually is or can do is totally irrelevant. In judging whether Tesla's system is misnamed all that matters is what a layperson *thinks* an auto pilot system does, and I have no doubts a layperson thinks an "autopilot" system does much more than other systems with less sexy names like the "lane assist" other car manufacturers use.

They can and they do it. Many Google employees live in San Francisco and commute to Mountain View, located in the South Bay. The company even provides shuttle buses for them, which fueled protests since rent prices close to the shuttle bus stops have gone up noticeably (search for google bus protests). This alone tells you that the number of people doing this is not negligible.

Anyone who has lived and worked in the Bay Area knows a lot of people living in San jose and working in San Francisco, vice versa, or anything in between. The fact that a great deal of people living in the so called Bay Area would consider working in any other part of the Bay Area makes it, by definition, a single job market, which is the focus of this study.

It is the other way around. The Java community has been signaling for years a lack of interest in what Java EE has to offer, and this decision by Oracle is just a response to that. It seems Java developers just prefer "chasing the fads". This is true for other development platforms too, like Node.js, Python, Ruby, where the main language is accompanied by a myriad of frameworks and libraries that you have to learn in order to become productive. This is a trend that you might not like but it is here to stay.

This affects less people and it is way less dramatic than what the summary implies. Java EE it's just a bunch of "enterprise" frameworks which run on top of the Java virtual machine. Many people using the Java platform don't even bother with Java EE and use other set of frameworks instead (like Spring or Hibernate), and even for those using some of the Java EE technologies, they are most likely using some third party (IBM Websphere) or open source (lJBoss, Tomcat) implementations, since the "official" Java EE implementation by Sun (and later Oracle) never gained much traction.

Although in this particular case it is unclear whether the driver was actually watching a DVD at the moment of the crash, it is pretty obvious that an assisted driving technology that can handle 95% of the driving situations will make users confident enough to be distracted when operating the vehicle, no matter how many warnings and disclaimers are shown telling users they need to pay attention all the time in case they have to gain control to handle the remaining 5% of the traffic situations.
This is clearly explained in this TED talk by the head of Google driverless car program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (this particular issue is discussed around 4:10, although the whole video is worth watching).
This is why Google approach to self driving cars is to release their product when the system is able to handle 100% of the driving situations and never require the user to take control in contrast to the Tesla approach of releasing a system than can handle most situations and make incremental improvements over time.

Search results and autocomplete suggestions are very different things. Extrapolating findings of a study on one of those to the other is very wrong. Autocomplete is merely an aid in writing the query. If we were talking about Google suppressing an unusual or hard to spell word from autocomplete in order to discourage searches on that term, I could buy the theory. But here we are talking about Google not suggesting the last 3 characters of a very common word after the user had already formulated most of the query. I find hard to believe that such a manipulation would prevent most users from completing the search and change the public perception on a candidate. Certainly the study you cite doesn't prove that either.

Gee! I wish I knew more about Hillary Clinton's crimes. I know! I'll use that Google thing to find out! OK, here we go: H-I-L-L-A-R-Y C-L-I-N-T-O-N C-R-I. Oh boy! I'm so tired of typing! Still three more characters to go. I don't think I can make it! I wish Google had autocompleted my search for me. I don't see "hillary clinton crimes" in the list of suggestions, though. Oh! If only there was a way for me to do this search! But no, it's impossible! Wait a minute! Of course! IT'S OBVIOUS! GOOGLE WANTS TO HIDE CLINTON'S CRIMES FROM ME!

I just tried it and it seems like just the opposite of a balkanizing product. It's a really open product. Way too open in my opinion. You don't need to install an app or even have an account to see the content generated with it, you just share the URL of your "space" using whatever medium you like and everyone can see your content. So there's no privacy either. Also there's no control: anyone with the link and a Google account can add content to your "space". So I would say it's just a glorified flyer sharing app, with the added "feature" that anyone can deface your flyer.